Website design versus website development

by Naseer Ahmad ·
Published April 16, 2010
· Updated December 30, 2014

The words website design and website development are basically two sides of the same coin. A website to be complete and running in the World Wide Web (www) needs both designing and development. Thus, for a person to create a proper website, the difference between the two needs to be clearly defined and differentiated.

Designing as we know includes the whole range from planning to execution. In the web world, designing a website usually refers to the process of coming up with ideas and incorporating them, usually through graphic software like Adobe Photoshop. When a website designer designs a web page, he actually provides the framework for the look and feel of the web page. This includes the whole appearance of the website, i.e., the colors used, the layout, were to put what images, interaction and interactivity and so on.

It is thus vitally important for a website designer to be very imaginative and creative in his outlook. At the same time he should have some basic understanding of the back end development work that goes behind developing a website. Having some prior idea on the technicalities of developing a website helps in the process of coming up with the best designs for a website. Thus the designer should use his artistic talent and knowledge of the savvy designs to design a website page which is what the clients usually look for.

On the other hand, website development deals with the ‘how’ part of converting the website design to something that is LIVE and viewable to the users of the world wide web. In other words, it is the where the developer uses different programs and codes to construct the back end of a website, like Notepad, Dreamweaver and so on.

Simply put, website development refers to the non-designing aspect of developing and building a web page, using various forms of scripting languages like JavaScript, PHP, ASP, ASP.NET and Coldfusion and so on to name a few. The website developers uses all this various scripting languages to put functionality to a otherwise dormant website design. It is the job of the website developer to use good web development principles, which will ensure the website to load smoothly and without any glitches.

Another point that the website developer needs to keep in mind is the usability of the website that he is developing. Here ‘usability’ means how the website will be viewed by the user in their environment. This is something very important because the website developer has to take note of all the different website browsers available and thus will have to do a lot of testing to see that the website looks the same in all the different platforms. Though sometimes very time consuming, this is something that just cannot be ignored.

Either way, to make a great success of a website, the website designer and the website developer needs to work in unison. Even though both of them have different roles to play in the overall development of the website, a proper co-ordination between the two is very essential.

I am Naseer Ahmad Mughal from Islamabad (Pakistan). I have been working as a Manager Development at SyntecX from last 4+ years, and its my passion to learn new things and implement them as a practice. I am also work as freelancer as well as a volunteer web development expert who loves to learn through innovative ideas and inspiration.
You can find me online at LinkedIn & Twitter